I like lists.  I always have,and I always will.  I like finding people's lists when they leave them behind in a grocery store.  I like Best and Worst lists.  I'll read magazines once a year just to see the lists they provide.  I alos like compiling my own.  Here's 25 things about me to ponder.

25.  I love Christmas music.   When I was a kid, the holidays were usually pretty painful.  My dad was a southern King Kong who would get frustrated and lash out at us.  He had his own damages that were never addressed, but the holidays were always laced with the potential for something bad to happen.  I think over the years my hunt for different and eclectic music has sent me in search of comfort as well. I can remember being sick or depressed in college and laying on my couch listening to Matthew Sweet or Leonard Cohen and feel better.  It was aural Thera Flu.  When I was student teaching, I worked at nights at a music store, and, around Christmas, they let me have samples of Christmas music that they had.  I intended to just use them in my classroom, but they became mine.  Christmas on Death Row was among them, but the novelty wore off of that one.  I mostly listen to the classics and spiritual Christmas music.  I never get tired of it either.  I sometimes feel really sad when the season is over, and the stores stop playing the music.  It deflates them, and there is nothing more depressing than a deflated T.J. Maxx's.

24.  I'm here because of Anne Lamott.  I discovered her in 2001 at a writers' workshop and fell in love with her writing , and her honesty.  Since she wrote for salon.com, I decided this was the place for me. 

23.  My family never had much money, and that meant very few trips to the movies.  During the summer, my brother and I would read the comic book adaptations  and novelizations of all of the movies on shopping trips with my mother.  We would be just as knowlegable as all of the kids who actually got to see the movies.  When I started making money of my own, I probably saw every movie I could in the theaters.

22. In college, I was banned from a video store for excessive late-charges.  I always paid them, so this seemed like a less than lucarative decision for the owners.

21.  I appeared in a low budget film entitled The Watchman . I started it as lark, and I thought that it might turn into a decent little thing that might attract an audience.  My mind was changed when we filmed a scene at a rest stop that was doubling for an exercise yard in a mental institution.  A character had started a fire in a waste basket to burn his hair as he cut it from his head.  The fire was started in a plastic wastebasket.  We watched as it melted and fell to one side and burned a small amount of grass.  We spent a great deal of time comparing our experience to those documented in American Movie.  You can watch it on youtube.

20.  I love good movies.  I don't care about their origins.  I love foreign movies  and home grown ones.  However, I've noticed that if it's a choice between The Unbearable Lightness of Being  or Prom Night (1980). I'll probably choose the latter.   Yes, I just admitted to being low brow and that I think that Prom Night  is a "good" movie.

19.  When I was a child, I was convinced that Stephen King and Dee Wallace Stone were watching me.

18. I once ate a Christmas tree ornament.  It was one of those cookies that had been shellaced. I had just gotten in from working out, and I was starved.  There was cookie on the table, and that is that.

17. My brother, mother, three aunts, sister-in-law and myself are all teachers.  I find it strange that I became one because I hated school so much. I was also not a very motivated student.

16.  The first female nudity I ever saw appeared in An Officer and a Gentleman.  It was provided by Debra Winger, and I was rather underwhelmed. Whenever someone mentions Debra Winger to this day, I become an old busybody in my head and think,"Oh, that Winger woman who took off her top in that Louis Gossett , jr. movie."   Of course, that could've only helped Enemy Mine.

15.  I didn't get a driver's license until I was nineteen.  This is partially because I saw it as a trap.  In my hometown, you got a vehicle you quit sports and worked to pay for it.  You also spent all of your time "going to town" or running the roads or cruising.  It cemented a person in that community for the rest of their lives.  I know it seems silly, but there is some truth to it.  Anyone who grew up in a small town can attest to this.

14.  I sometimes think of career paths that would work for people I otherwise have no interest in.  Right now, I want to tell Rob Zombie to buy the rights to Joe Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" and film that instead of a new Halloween movie.  The story about two white trash wastes of skin who run afoul of some snuff film makers would be the perfect marriage of source and adaptation.  In fact. I think all of Lansdale's serial killer and white trash horror tales would be perfect for Zombie.  He should buy the mess of'em.  "By Bizarre Hands" and "Steppin' Out, Summer 1968" would be nice stories in an anthology film made by Zombie.

13. I'm a sucker for anthology films, especially those made by Amicus in the 70's.

12.  I smoked for a year just to have something to do.

11.  I love it when respected actors appear in bad movies and people rail about how they were better than the material.  Yeah, they were, but, man, I'll bet that new boat they bought was even better.

10.  I really wish I could be a stay-at-home dad. 

9. I'm currently reading a book I bought twelve years ago, and I am only now getting around to reading.

8.  I think that I am better than people sometimes.  However, I have ample proof that I am not.  It's a bad habit that I find both repulsive and comforting. 

7.  I think the movie Clerks caught an age group at a certain point in their lives, but has since gone on to be used by people to arrest their development at that point and to inspire younger people to strive for that point in their lives and remain there.  It's an idea similar to one presented in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: Invention of the Human.  The idea that we learn how to be us by reading and viewing works of art.  It might sound cracked, but there are eighteen year olds emulating these characters perpetually trapped in 1994.   I wish they had chosen to emulate Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk.  They'd all have to befriend bodybuilders willing to paint themselves green then.

6.   I have never even been tempted to try an illegal drug.  I always found that strange since I had plenty of friends who indulged.  It just never seemed interesting.

 5.  I mispronounced"synecdoche" for most of my undergraduate career.  I still mispronounce "debris" and "chaos" in my head when I am reading.  I don't do it out loud though.

4.  I was dumped once in a red car on a cold November night.  I thought I would die.  I didn't.  I met my wife the next summer.

3.  We are expecting twins, and the stress of financial issues as well as professional ones   that are impacted due to this  is almost devastatingly overwhelming to me when I think about it too much.

2.  I admire poets. However, I do not admire people who think that they are poets.

1.  I pray constantly.

Selah.